


Oathkeeper

by Brightwinged



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 15:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6334912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightwinged/pseuds/Brightwinged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of all things, Mikleo turns back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oathkeeper

To be used as a bullet in Siegfried is to give everything he is to one pure bolt of power, torn loose from all his moorings in the space of a moment. He is fired into the heart of malevolence, and he wrenches at it with all his strength, filling every space he finds to erode it into weakness, helping the others eat the link between Heldalf and Maotelus away. 

Pain and darkness become his world for some time. When Heldalf dies, they lift, and he floats free -- just an essential core of spirit now, power nearly all gone, identity and thought reduced to distant concepts.

Beyond him, others lead the way out, pushing him and each other along as best as they can. Below him, someone says _thank you,_ and though Mikleo can no longer comprehend the meaning of the words, there’s still something about them which pulls at him, arrests his hazy flight: the acceptance carried on that last breath, the ghost of the memory of the shape of a smile. 

Mikleo is nothing but vapor and will then, but all his life his will has placed him by Sorey’s side, just behind his shoulder. Even here, even now with the weight of the land in the balance, things are no different. Before the others can stop him he slides free of them, and falls back toward the earth.

Sorey’s already lost entirely in the pulse of power from Maotelus, his domain swallowed and their pact broken, but Mikleo knows how to find his way. They were connected before ever they were Shepherd and Sub Lord, have been connected all their lives, and that bond is the easiest fragment of himself to gather back in. Mikleo follows its thin and shining road until he finds Sorey slumped against the dragon’s side, waves of light lapping over and through their skin.

He disappears inside his chest, smooth as his element. Perhaps after being crushed by the Lord of Calamity he should feel afraid, but this time he’s with Sorey, and fear does not exist here. Maotelus’s light fills the vessel-space, buffets him here and there and tires him, but at the centre of things the place made for him remains. Sorey’s soul curls securely around him when he reaches it, holding his weary self together like a chick in an egg, letting him rest.

Above them his perception and memories curl into the clouds, holding them over the place of origins. Most of Mikleo remains scattered in a thousand thousand drops: weight of water, promise of rain.

Later, he’ll remember it as the most selfish thing he’s ever done, and yet he won’t -- can’t -- regret it. Sorey has always been in the world he dreamed of; he swears in that moment that he won’t walk away until they can see it together.

-

Time passes and Mikleo feels it slip by, though not in years and centuries. Those are human constructs, and he’s caught up in things far older: the cycle of seasons, the slow pull of the moon upon the tides. Sorey and Maotelus infuse the land and Mikleo takes a small but growing piece of the rivers and the rain, their strange shared triad of existence like a set of nesting dolls. Sorey is a seed of purity and spring water feeding them both, and Maotelus shelters their souls, turning age and decay away, and Mikleo does his part to guard Camlann around them. 

It isn’t lonely. Dew sometimes bears strange images when it returns to the clouds: a blasted crater in the midst of a land of ice; a woman in white standing in a field of flowers, hands clasped and head bowed in the morning light; a violet blade in an unfamiliar red-gloved hand, its edges blurring the air around it. Life flits like quicksilver through the currents of the water and the sky, bird and beast and fish, human and seraph and hellion. Mikleo warns the latter away with flood and ice, but welcomes the rest.

Voices carry to him from the cliffs too, lifted on the wind and the weather, held in the heat that heralds lightning, echoed upon the earth where rain falls and winter rime forms. The seraphim they traveled with are born of the world, connected to the elements that thread through his, and they can still reach him in some way, can still carry the sentiments of their human companions as well. They’ve laid their own blessings to protect them, and they continue to send their strength, their love, their hopes, and their continuing assertions that Sorey and Mikleo are both idiots. 

Sometimes, when Mikleo’s aware enough to think of it, he tries to pass some of these things on to Sorey. Sorey sleeps his purposeful, depthless sleep still, and cannot hear. Mikleo holds on to the messages for both of them instead, every single feeling and word, and is patient.

-

Maotelus, for his part, is largely silent. His thoughts must return from somewhere dark and deep, after all, and his slow purification happens in a sleep that is nearly as total as Sorey’s. But he does stir on occasion, vast turnings of the world under the bowl of the sky. 

He only speaks to Mikleo once, and when he does, his voice rumbles all the way down into the earth and all the way up towards the stars.

 _Little lord of water._ Maotelus sounds strange and in-between as it resounds through their vessel, Sorey’s familiar cadences overlaid by a fading dragon’s snarl. _Your friend’s life is ending._

Mikleo reaches for fear, reaches for anger, but Maotelus continues before he can quite touch them. _Where a human makes this kind of sacrifice, a great thing can be done in return,_ he says, with a note of wistfulness. _Where a human and a seraph have made it together...that raises a few more possibilities._

Mikleo makes a great effort, turning himself over in Sorey’s heart, finding hope instead and clutching it close. _I’m listening,_ he says.

It hails over Camlann, all of that winter and well into spring.

-

One day, someone calls his true name. Mikleo has never truly slept, not through any of this, but it still startles him out of a long heavy daze, pulls him back from a great and outspread distance. He’s sluggish in responding, but the voice keeps calling, steady and sure, and their connection brightens and strengthens. It draws him inexorably down from cloud and current, bringing himself back to himself. Slowly, he remembers how to be a person again.

Seasons or months later, he sinks back into his body, settles into its contours, feels his heart thud into life and his blood pump through his veins. There’s a hand intertwined with his: familiar, warm, strong.

When he can, Mikleo takes a deep breath, pulling air and moisture into his lungs. He opens his eyes.

His head is pillowed in Sorey’s lap, and Sorey is staring down at him anxiously, wide awake, no sign of Maotelus left around them. There’s light caught in his eyes and hair, though, white light that limns every contour of his body and every movement he makes. He hurts a bit to look at, but Mikleo can still read his expression perfectly well: hope and uncertainty, and a total lack of recognition.

“Are you Luzrov Rulay?” he asks. 

Mikleo squeezes his fingers.

-

They’ve both grown, somehow, their clothes caked with dust and no longer fitted properly to their bodies, their hair lying in ridiculous lengths over the stone around them. They have to cut it for each other before they can even leave Artorius’s Throne, because it turns out Sorey sat there with Mikleo so long that they’re now hopelessly entangled.

Mikleo conjures them a pane of ice for a mirror and puts a thin sleek edge on a broken-off chip of stone for a blade. It’s easy to do these things now even without his staff, easy as thought, and he marvels at it. Sorey doesn’t remember their childhood mishaps, and looks bemused when Mikleo threatens dire consequences if Sorey doesn’t follow his instructions exactly, but he’s willing enough, and they both get out of it intact.

The exercise serves to limber the bones and muscles of their arms, too. Sorey seems to be functioning just fine, but he admits he woke up cold and stiff, and he's sore from lying and then sitting on the stone. Mikleo’s movements, on the other hand, are either too careful or ungraceful, as he works to keep his mind off the water around and inside them. More than once when they try walking Sorey has to catch him and set him back on his feet; he huffs in irritation at himself, and tries to pay more attention to where his limbs go. 

They make their slow way through the ruins, leaning on each other.

There’s a glow coming from the last hallway before the outdoors, and when they step inside Sorey gasps. The stonework looks much the same as it did when they saw it last, but the contents are different. A welter of uneven orbs carpet the floor, and flat panels of ice coat sections of the walls. They’re all filled, a spark of Sorey at the heart of each, with Mikleo’s power of preservation cradling it in pale blue light. Mikleo bends down with utmost care, and picks one up. 

He holds it out to Sorey. The memory inside echoes against his palm: children’s laughter and the creak of a new book's spine. His voice nearly cracks with delight when he says, “These are yours.”

No matter how much time has passed, he finds, Sorey’s smile still looks exactly like home.

**Author's Note:**

> You can blame laskaris and evr for this one, because I read their bad ending fic and bawled over it horribly, and then proceeded to try and write a different, only questionably better sort of ending.
> 
> I'll just be over here.


End file.
